👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little bit of linguistic weirdness: "Salvatorialb." 10 syllables to your face! It absolutely refuses a straightforward punchline, which frankly is the most amusing thing about it.
Basically, and I mean
basically
, “salvatorialb'’ (pronounced, roughly, as if you were gargling with regret whilst clutching a small, somewhat damp, volume of old letters) refers to the act or state of a book being… essentially, religiously, meticulously, and probably sweatily, carefully and lovingly re-bound.
Now! Before you picture some Victorian spinster painstakingly stitching together crumbling covers, let's unpack that. The original word, the foundational block here, is "salvatorial," which means, quite wonderfully, to rescue or save from ruin. Think of a desperate archivist snatching a decaying bible from a draughty attic.
Then you slap on the suffix –"–al’ (as in, a state of being) + the ending, "-b'’—a bit of an antiquated, almost guttural way to denote something that has undergone a serious, almost sacred, re-formation. You are essentially saying this volume was
sacrificed to the altar of preservation!
The term itself is terribly old, originating in 18th century book collecting and private libraries, a time when the value of an exquisitely bound antique could literally outshine the current year.